Ask HN: What are the best scholarly papers you read in 2017? - <AUTHOR> An AskHN question about <i>best book</i> made me aware I've read many more papers than books lately. (I mean scholarly/academic articles, not newspapers!) Any field is great, name a few if 1 is too hard to pick. And maybe omit the ones you have to be a specialist in your exact field to understand a word of. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I got introduced to side channel attacks 2 years ago, but only recently had the time to read up on RowHammer attacks. In particular, I was quite taken by the research on Clementine Maurice. Won't paste any links here but a quick Google search on her would lead to a treasure trove of her works.

<comment><USER3> Steve Gibson has done some podcasts about RowHammer stuff:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYkahXb1gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYkahXb1gs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PapZsPLGlo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PapZsPLGlo4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wGR_LPh42k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wGR_LPh42k)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Google Dapper paper was a good read, but it's from 2010, so I'm not sure if it counts.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does the Ethereum White Paper count?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. :-) Not sure why it wouldn't, looks interesting thanks. Unless you thought I had probably heard more than enough about BTC already?! I didn't really know what 'white paper' meant. "White papers may be considered grey literature."[0] Aah.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper)</comment></comment>


National Geographic magazine shifts to for-profit status with Fox partnership - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national-geographic-magazine-shifts-to-for-profit-status-with-fox-partnership/2015/09/09/7c9f034e-56f0-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> More and probably coverage here:

[http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/372049/national- geogra...](http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/372049/national-geographic- magazine-is-becoming-a-for-profit/)

An aside: HN's requirement to use the actual headline lead me to post the 2nd- best coverage; its headline was better. No policy is perfect of course.

</comment><comment><USER2> National Geographic is a tremendously respected brand and is one of the last quality educational TV channels that hasn't "sold out" by making cheap reality shows (See History Channel, The Learning Channel, Discovery, etc). I really hope this doesn't change that.

<comment><USER3> I, too, am disturbed by the news, but let's not exaggerate the respectability of Nat Geo channel's programming. They've brought us such gems as American Gypsies, Doomsday Preppers, and Polygamy, USA.

<comment><USER2> Great point! They've definitely drifted towards more "entertainment-focused" shows as of late.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to become a better developer? TAKE A BREAK. - <AUTHOR> http://www.matheuslima.com/want-to-become-a-better-developer/

<comment> dj-wonk Amen. Standing up, walking, biking, roller skating, skateboarding, boxing, hot-air ballooning, ...something different!... can be a big help. We are not robots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed.</comment></comment>


Coming In March: IT Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/coming-in-march-it-stack-overflow/

<comment><USER2> I'm happy about this, mostly because it will keep Stack Overflow more "on topic"</comment>


Discussion - Why do you do it? - <AUTHOR>

I wasn't sure whether to post this here since what I'd like to discuss is not directly linked to startups, the web, funding, and so on.  But, I figured it would gratify one's intellectual curiosity as the guidelines say :), and also shed some light on how entrepreneurs and like-minded people view the world.
So what I'd like to ask you is seemingly simple: is there a higher purpose to what you do? Do you get to work because you believe your actions will benefit mankind, because you enjoy it and think that is all that matters? Or do you do it because it brings financial gains which help you achieve your other dreams? Or is it something else? I'm not trying to point out a good or bad way, I'm just really curious as to what drives people to go through sometimes unbearable difficulties, in order to achieve something.
Thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is what I believe and what I keep reminding myself when the going gets tough.

I've come to realize that creating something - taking an idea and forging it into something new, never seen before - is an act similar not in scale but in principle to the big bang. I believe that for us as sentient entities there is no better way of proving who we truly are and no better way of leaving our mark.

And this applies to absolutely everyone, no matter what we do or have done, no matter how short our life, how bland our existence, how small our choices, all of us take part in creating something much, much greater. Simply by existing we alter flow, we create, we add something.</comment>


Oakland Cafe Owner's Banning Laptop Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://actualcafe.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> I've been deep in cafe culture for almost 20 years now (hanging out in them since I was just starting high school, and now I've been working from cafes and home for 3 years), mainly in the Chicago area.

There was a big transition over the past 10 years when coffee shops went from being smoking establishments mainly catering to young people and people on the fringes to being places where a wide demographic of people meet to talk and, for many people, work on computers. Laptops + wireless breathed new life into independent coffee shops at a time when they were being hit with smoking bans and still licking their wounds from a decade of starbucks expansion.

The transition to wireless has created a thriving cafe culture that's more busy than I've ever seen it. The cafes around me are so packed all day every day that I have to time my arrival to make sure I get a seat. 10 years ago they were mostly empty during the day. And it's not just more customers, it's better customers. Schizophrenics who sat with a single cup of coffee for hours while harassing other customers have been replaced by young professionals who buy double lattes.

The vast majority of coffee shops that didn't embrace or take seriously the transition to wireless have lost all of their customers and closed. It's been somewhat heartbreaking for me to watch some of my favorite coffee shops sit empty and eventually close down because the owners didn't take the wireless transition seriously and/or because they held on to an imaginary ideal about cafe culture.

Turning it off on weekends makes some sense; people aren't working there as much. However, it's a dangerous idea for cafe owners to take the anti-wireless sentiment too far. It reminds me of when I worked in academic libraries during the period they were still holding on to their luddite fantasies about the role of libraries. If you own a cafe and are considering this, you better make damn sure that your cafe has enough of these ideal, laptopless customers. I've seen a lot of cafes gamble on this and lose.

All that said, it's interesting that wireless has made coffee shops so popular that people once again value them as social centers.

<comment><USER3> _wireless has made coffee shops so popular that people once again value them as social centers_

You mean social with each other, or social with their online friends?

<comment><USER2> Social with each other. Neighborhood social centers, enough so that people care enough to even consider banning laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cafe owners are certainly free to structure their cafes how they like. I actually appreciate that his laptop policy is clear, I'd feel welcome going there with a laptop on weekdays. Sometimes they make the power outlets inaccessible, or tell you to leave when it gets busy, and they don't post those policies so clearly.

I think it'd be neat to have a cafe with different sections of seating arrangements aimed at laptop users, chatters, newspaper readers where people weren't getting in each other's way.

<comment><USER5> There's obviously room for many cafe structures.

<http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6604801.html>

This article goes into some detail about two of my favorite cafes here in Houston. One caters to people looking to work or study and has become a sort- of office for many, not to mention a great place to network among other technology professionals. I'll often work there when I'm sick of the office just because the atmosphere is so nice.

The other is a coffee bar and has the best coffee / espresso in town by far, and though you see the occasional laptop user, they are very rare.

I'm very glad to have both options and frequent them both a couple of times a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> GREAT idea! I went into my local coffee shop here in Chicago last weekend, and EVERY single table was occupied with someone with a laptop. At least 25 tables, all with laptops, me with no where to sit with my food/drink.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm not in cafes enough to understand this, but how long are laptop users camping out on tables?

I can see if they're checking a quick email while having a coffee, but experiences I've had and maukdaddy above show that people are camping out a lot longer than that first cup. So are they staying all day? Are they purchasing more beverages?

<comment><USER2> I often spend all afternoon at various cafes, buying a $2-4 drink every 1-2 hours.

Most people with laptops spend 1-2 hours. You'll get people working longer in the mid morning and mid afternoon. People who show up with laptops at 2 (1:30-2 is a common transition period), for instance, seldom stay past 5/5:30 (another common transition period). 5 or 6 hours tends to be the upper limit; most people can only sit in the same spot for so long. Obviously, it's very rude to this without buying drinks at regular intervals.

At many cafes, people that are ruder about it are almost never regulars. Any cafe that's popular enough to be filled up will have a network of regulars. Regulars chat, share books, go out for drinks and, among the programmer regulars, chat about startups, collaborate on projects or hire one another for contract work. You'd probably not be able to recognize it if you go in and people are all reading and on laptops at the time, but if you start frequenting it you'd start to pick up on it

<comment><USER7> _Any cafe that's popular enough to be filled up will have a network of regulars. Regulars chat, share books, go out for drinks and, among the programmer regulars, chat about startups, collaborate on projects or hire one another for contract work. You'd probably not be able to recognize it if you go in and people are all reading and on laptops at the time, but if you start frequenting it you'd start to pick up on it._

When went out of town for an internship a few years ago, I was a very frequent patron of a couple chain shops near the office and one independent shop downtown. I could work on personal projects and enjoy a few drinks without being disturbed. I was in often enough over a six month stretch to recognize most of the staff. Even so, I don't remember seeing more than a few repeat patrons, and even they were only around two or three times. I may have just been around at the wrong time of day, but I covered pretty much every time slot on evenings and weekends.

<comment><USER2> That's pretty unusual for an indie shop. Typically that would only be the case if the place was heavily reliant on foot traffic. If a coffee shop isn't tapped into a neighborhood and some surrounding social networks that bring in repeat customers, then it has to figure out a way to get a steady stream of new customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These cafe laptop bans remind me of the infamous ban on snowboarding at the Deer Valley ski resort in Utah. (And seem to provoke a similar response, even though 99% of their competitors don't have bans) I suspect they're more about marketing the business to a niche clientele than because the laptops are a problem in themselves.

<comment><USER9> Snow boarders cause more accidents and add risk and higher insurance premiums to skiers around them. In europe at least, there is enough demand, mostly from older people for such a ban, in more than one resort (i believe).

I don't want to sound like some old-fuddy duddy (i'm not that old), but i was injured quite badly by a snowboarder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm somewhat ambivalent on this. I can see the motivation, but it does sometimes seem to drift into an overbearing cafe owner trying to socially engineer _exactly_ what kind of culture they want their cafe to have.

The local cafe here that banned laptops after 5pm to encourage more social evenings wasn't happy enough with the results, so subsequently _also_ banned "studying" after 5pm, however you define that. The owner justified it by saying that his cafe wasn't a study hall, and there couldn't be a social scene in his cafe if it was overrun with college kids studying and doing homework.

At some point it becomes kind of ridiculous to feel like you're being socially policed by the owner, and it's more pleasant to just visit other cafes that won't look over my shoulder deciding if I'm being social enough or not.

</comment><comment><USER11> I know that I, for one, never bring my laptop to cafes—instead, I pull out my phone and web-browse over 3G. Does the policy cover this (increasingly common) activity as well?

</comment><comment><USER12> Popular Cafes here in Seattle (Victrola, Vivace) have been shutting off the wireless on weekends for at least a year now. People seem used to it.

<comment><USER13> Vancouver's most popular local chain, JJ Bean, has never adopted wireless and they continue to be massively successful based on the quality of their product. They're rapidly expanding.

Many other notable cafe's such as 49th parallel also don't have any wireless.

I guess it's all up to local culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. After reading the article and some of the comments I'm realizing how different the cafe culture in Europe is. We have been living in the Bay Area for a number of years, so it's not like I haven't seen the droves of people sitting silently in coffee shops and tinkering away on their laptops. But the fact that this even generates a discussion.. :-)

A lot of European establishments I know have decided to never join the wifi movement. And even if many cafes now offer wifi it's very hard to spot people actually sitting with their laptops. Why would you want to, there are so many other things you can do in a cafe. Read, think, draw or just plain talk to the people in your party.

<comment><USER15> I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK and while you _very_ occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of a cafe on a laptop, it's nowhere near as common as it seems to be in the US.

It's certainly pretty much exclusively a city thing - I know what short shrift I'd get if I walked into a cafe in my rural town, bought a £1.50 cup of coffee and whipped out my laptop to spend a couple of hours working. (The lack of wi- fi isn't an issue - people here heavily use those little 3G USB "dongles".) I really couldn't say why there's such a marked difference, though.

Slightly bizarrely, last time I went in a McDonald's in some grim Manchester suburb they had large signs advertising free wi-fi. Don't we study and work hard so we get to work in places that _aren't_ McDonald's?

<comment><USER16> The target market for McDonalds is chav kids on pay-as-you-go phones who want to watch videos on Youtube. They don't seriously expect anyone to be working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Uhmm... So I believe that newspapers and other reading materials are also banned in his cafe

<comment><USER17> Why the downvotes? Don't newspapers also reduce the interaction among customers... I don't mind cafes banning or discouraging squatters or switching off wifi, but why are they stopping people from checking email during breakfast even when they are using their own USB modem/connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. I agree with you in that newspapers take away from interaction.

Laptops, though, can consume people in so many different ways, which makes it harder to approach a conversation with someone. You never know if someone is checking email, doing work, or just social masturbating on Facebook. There is a thicker "invisible social wall" when trying to approach someone with a laptop because you don't want to bother something important, so very few people even try to start a conversation.

When someone's reading a paper, you know they are interested in the day's current news, which makes an easy conversation opener. You know they aren't busy doing their taxes or writing a paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't see what's so terrible about this, other than just knee-jerk moral outrage.

It probably also helps deal with some of the more disruptive elements of running a coffee shop with wi-fi, like squatters, torrenters, etc. From my time working at one, I recall that the most frequent laptop users could be pretty disruptive, and didn't spend much more than a typical customer.

<comment><USER18> To clarify the above, generally we'd get three kinds of laptop customers.

The first were "on-the-way" types; they'd get a latte or mocha and a pastry, using their laptops while they did (on battery), then leave. Not really any personal contact, just a matter of business.

The second group would do the same, but would generally be friendly with the staff. They seemed to stay a little longer than the above, but it's possible that I only think that because they were recognizable and friendly.

The third group were what I called "squatters". They'd set up at a table like they owned it, and generally didn't care who they inconvenienced in the process. The squatters tended to stay for hours, and tended to try to stretch their coffee dollar; buying drip and adding a lot of sugar and milk, or doing the same with espresso to make a ghetto latte. More than once I found squatters who unplugged a grinder or a coffee machine to plug in their laptop, and then got ranted at when I informed them that I needed the outlet to provide service to others.

My experiences certainly don't prove anything, of course.

<comment><USER4> I stayed in Pittsburgh for a month in a place with no wireless, and there was a cafe nearby that let me sit all day with my laptop and my dog! I was amazed, I drank as many mochas as I could, but I wished I could pay an hourly rate or something, I really didn't want them to feel taken advantage of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I applaud the effort. I've always thought of cafes in a romantic way as conversation/idea factories but this illusion is completely shattered when I walk in and people are clanking away at their keyboards. So it's nice to see somebody is trying to bring back the romantic image even if it is just for the weekends.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like a good idea for a few cafes to do, especially for PR purposes. I doubt this is going to be a trend though; people shouldn't take it too seriously.

</comment><comment><USER21> I read a similar article a number of years ago, but at the time there were no negative comments (to my memory). Funny how attitudes have changed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, what extreme reactions on the negative side. It sounds a lot like smokers being angry at no smoking laws for bars.

There are two issues: 1) Whether a business has the right to limit what goes on in that business (and a worthy debate that is); and 2) How serious your addiction might be if it provokes that much anger.

Step away from the keyboard.

<comment><USER23> Well, I think the smokers are angry because the gov't in some places has stepped in and made it illegal to smoke at _any_ bar. That's quite different than a coffee shops deciding to not allow laptops in their particular store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like Cafe Grumpy NYC</comment>


The Accidental History of the @ Symbol (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-accidental-history-of-the-symbol-18054936/?no-ist <comment><USER2> > "The symbol's modern obscurity ended in 1971"

It's missing a step or two. How did it get into ASCII if it were obscure? Model 33 teletype, after all, was one of the first machines to use ASCII, so there must be a reason why Tomlinson could look down and see the key in the first place.

A quick check of typewriter keyboards from the 1950s (eg [http://mytypewriter.com/smith- coronaelectraportablec1958.asp...](http://mytypewriter.com/smith- coronaelectraportablec1958.aspx) ) shows that @, ¢, ½, and ¼ were all common in that era, so it isn't like other options weren't available.

And we know from [http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf](http://trafficways.org/ascii/ascii.pdf) , which was recently posted here on HN, that:

> The September 14-15, 1961 meeting of X3.2 saw further revisions of the > printing characters of the code and the most elaborate plans so far for the > arrangement of the control characters. The angular tilde (), multiplication > sign (×), and vertical line (|) were deleted and replaced by an at sign (@) > and less-than-or-equal-to (≤) and greater-than-or-equal-to (≥) operators.

On page 22 it does say that '@' was the "softest" of characters, and "more readily subject to replacement" and on page 23 quotes Mackenzie "it was forecast that, in the French national variant of the ISO 7-Bit Code, @ would be replaced by à", for why the "@" was placed before "A".

But that doesn't explain why an otherwise "obscure" characters is prominent enough to include over other possibilities, like ±, √, or ° from figure 35.

Going back to the Smithsonian article:

> "Tomlinson chose @—"probably saving it from going the way of the 'cent' sign > on computer keyboards,""

Cent wasn't in ASCII. ASCII was standard by 1971. There's no way '@' would have been removed from ASCII, and I don't see why it would have been removed from the keyboard had, say, '#' been used for email instead of '@'.</comment>


Dave Needle and the Story of the Amiga Computer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nesWip4Nft0 <comment><USER2> I interviewed at 3DO and one of the people I interviewed with was Needle. I recall hearing that the guy only wore t-shirts, and never wore one twice.

At the time I thought that the only way that could happen is if he had a network of friends who supplied him with a steady stream of shirts. It was hard to imagine a person spending the time and money if they had to do it all themselves.

<comment><USER3> When I worked for Steve Jobs he would often change clothes several times per day. More than once when I was in his office when he would take off his custom-made, imported dress shirt and put on another from a huge wall closet in his office. Same for his pants. He would throw them away (our trash was incinerated at the time). When he showed up in his old Pumas or black turtleneck or bowtie or beat up Levis we knew that he expected to be seen by the public or the press - he was in his "costume". He literally bought custom shirts by the hundreds and thousands and they were delivered in cargo- containers. It was when I worked for Steve that I realized that my philosophy that "the rich deserve their wealth" and "it's their money" were completely wrong and even immoral.

<comment><USER4> Was this before he returned back to Apple? I though he always wore black turtlenecks when he returned to Apple.

<comment><USER3> Steve rotated his "costumes". I handled some of NeXT's strategic technical accounts and also worked on some special projects in Engineering. The bowtie and turtleneck were unusual at the time, since he seemed to favor the Pumas and beat-up Levis when he was being seen by the public. I think he felt that the bowtie and turtleneck had run their course.

Something that people don't appreciate is that Steve was a marketing person - and he described himself in that way. He carefully crafted his image and carefully selected his words. His success was not based on his personality in the way that so many people seem to think. There are lots of short-tempered and demanding people who are complete failures. I wish that the business community could understand that - they seem fixated on the superficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just read about the 3DO console (that he also co-invented) and how 3DO (VC funded company) had troubles 17 years ago in "The Internet Bubble" book (1999).

Sad to see this picture [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Dave_Nee...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Dave_Needle_Amiga_30.jpg) and read about his dead, RIP!

 _" [...] And this high-stakes competition never rests. Just within this last year [1998], two huge anti-Microsoft deals came down when two pairs of Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies dramatically combined - AOL with Netscape and At Home with Excite. The goal in these two Kleiner Perkins partner-orchestrated moves was clearly to consolidate forces in the Internet portal space and keep Microsoft MSN online service to distant competitor. In such efforts to seek advantage over Microsoft and dominate the Internet industry, Kleiner Perkins, whether intentionally or not, has been a huge contributer to the inflation of the Internet Bubble. [...]"_ (from the book mentioned above on page 71, dated 1999) I think, we can all be grateful that MSN (a CompuServe and AOL alike competitor on steroids) lost and the open World Wide Web won. Coming back the Amiga video, not always the better tech wins.

</comment><comment><USER6> We merged [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144751), which announces his death, into this one, which has a nice interview (and also was posted earlier).

<comment><USER7> Its only when reading the comments that I realized he just passed away. A more telling title would be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems the wiki article has been updated with the news [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Needle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Needle)

<comment><USER9> Not much information there. Not even a date of birth. Here's another interview with him.

[http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/09/dave- needl...](http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/09/dave-needles-one- of-kind-federation.html)

<comment><USER10> I had difficulty finding his birthday. He was honored with the page, ... Responded jokingly about bday as it wasnt important until he would die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How sad. He didn't look that old, does anyone know what happened to him?

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a cheerful and friendly guy. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER10> RIP</comment>


PEGs: Parsing Expression Grammars - <AUTHOR> http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/lang/peg.pdf

<comment><USER2> I read this paper not long ago as it was referenced in Ward Cunningham's interesting work in Exploratory Parsing [0]. It's a quick read and definitely interesting. If you're interested there's a yacc equivalent peg/leg [1]. The only thing that wasn't clear to me (and I'd appreciate enlightenment if anyone has any) is why Cunningham's Exploratory Parsing depends so much on PEGs? Is it simply the non-ambiguous nature of the parse tree?

0\. <http://c2.com/~ward/sao/TechIgnite-v1/> 1\. <http://piumarta.com/software/peg/>

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant I have to mention OMeta, a language based on PEGs (plus a few extensions): <http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/>

It's dead simple, and quite powerful: it helps implement all compilation phases, from parsing to code generation. And it compiles itself in about 400 lines of code.

</comment><comment><USER3> It should be mentioned that this paper is from 2004, and that in the meantime there's even a Wikipedia article about PEG: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar>

</comment><comment><USER4> PEG.js has an online grammar creator:

<http://pegjs.majda.cz/online>

</comment><comment><USER5> There are some great PEG parsers in Ruby:

* Parslet: <http://kschiess.github.com/parslet/>

* Treetop: <http://kschiess.github.com/parslet/>

<comment><USER6> Treetop is great - I have previously written parsers using yacc and lex, and I found treetop to be around about 2 orders of magnitude more productive. That said, I don't know that I would want to use it on large files with a complex grammar :/</comment></comment>


Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50167812 <comment><USER2> Earlier thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341057)

<comment><USER3> With earlier video link that was the highlight for me:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm imagining a ridiculous sci-fi future where self-driving car AI never satisfactorily works, so we just stick trained rats in the dashboard.

<comment><USER5> Training rats as suicide bombers to crash cars against cats seem a more probable result.

<comment><USER6> Why not planes?

The food bowl was a legitimate military target; it provided nutrients that the cats used to build better claws.

<comment><USER5> Small airplanes piloted by catikazes with tiny machine guns (rat-rat-tat) is scheduled for the second part of the experiment as a source of rodent stress

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You'd have to wonder what would happen to their stress levels if they were subjected to traffic....

<comment><USER8> A good test would be to have them drive in Austin.

<comment><USER9> You are spoiled if Austin is your go-to example of bad traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amazing thing here is that rats are intelligent enough to learn to drive, albeit a simple vehicle. That alone is newsworthy, without the experiment on stress reduction.

<comment><USER6> Ehh, it's not clear to me that humans should be particularly good a driving. It's not like we evolved for it, we can just understand spoken instructions. I'm not convinced that an octopus, a dolphin, a raven, or a cheetah would necessarily be worse at the task than a human (given training in the proper format) -- it's perfectly concievable to me that a cheetah might have evolved to handle object avoidance at higher speeds than humans have, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> <insert joke about new Uber/Lyft business model here>

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, driving is a good de-stressor, probably because it gives you more agency when you feel powerless.

<comment><USER13> I recently setup a racing sim rig and love to just cruise around after work as I don't have a real car. Absolutely de-stresses me.

<comment><USER12> That's probably smarter than my after-work "tire warmups".

In the winter here, I tend to slide around corners, too. I live in a rural area, so it's not too dangerous, but it's something to do.

<comment><USER14> Definitely fun, but do keep in mind the amount of noise that generates and keep it to a minimum when within a mile of people. I used to live on a rural road with like six other houses, and people going 100 down a 35 with houses does get kind of old.

<comment><USER12> I have my favorite empty county roads. No houses for miles, great visibility. I prefer going to the south and driving on old banked mountain roads, though. Most people can't even get to the speed limit safely on those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bet they're more like 4 wheelers or golf carts to rats than cars. I think they're simply just having fun. Or maybe it's similar to the whole pavlov's dog thing, drive a car and get a treat. Eventually driving is associated with treats.

Now it would be interesting to see them making the rats drive to something stressful like us having to go to work has an effect on stress. Then maybe developing a Rat uber to see if riding in a rat car to a treat will have a net gain or loss on stress....okay I just wanted an excuse to mention rat uber in that last sentence.

</comment><comment><USER16> _a rat would sit on the aluminium plate and touch the copper wire. The circuit was then complete_

I do wonder if they had a control group with just this electrocution step, otherwise I don't see how they can relate any of the results to the driving.

<comment><USER17> No reason no believe rats are sensitive to currents measured in single microamps, which is what's most likely used to trigger microcontroller inputs. Whatever the schematic, I can guarantee that the rat isn't used to directly connect the motor to the battery :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When pigeons guided bombs:

[https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/25/pigeons-guided- bom...](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/25/pigeons-guided-bomb/)

<comment><USER19> Rat-guided cars? B.F. Skinner will give you a small food reward if you hold his beer. [http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project- pigeon-1948-pr...](http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project- pigeon-1948-project-orcon-b-f-skinner-american/)

Actually, come to think of it Project Pigeon/Orcon is also of philosophical importance: it joins Russell's chickens as an example of the hazards of inductive reasoning and greedy algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I bet this could be extended to mice scale mechs where they learn to (without harm) battle each other in arenas for treats while you stream it on the darkweb and take bets.

</comment><comment><USER5> Now put two rats frolicking in the back sit of a tiny Chevrolet for a full de- stressing treatment.

</comment><comment><USER21> good news everyone</comment>


BBC Radio 3 Concert Sound: live output compressed using FLAC (Firefox only) - open-source-ux http://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/projects/radio-3-concert-sound <comment> open-source-ux For those of you not familiar with BBC Radio 3, it is a mostly classical music station, but also features world music, jazz and arts coverage.

More info on this project:

 _" This pilot offers Radio 3 in the highest possible audio quality so that our audience experiences our output exactly as it left the studio."_

 _" For the duration of the pilot we are providing a simulcast of Radio 3's live output compressed using FLAC, so it sounds every bit (no pun intended!) as good as when it left us."_

 _" Because the specification for how to do this is so new, only Firefox (51 or greater) on desktop is able to play our stream"_

 _" Note that you'll need a decent broadband connection – we'd recommend at least 2mbps to avoid buffering."_

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/projects/radio-3-concert- sound/i...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/projects/radio-3-concert-sound/inside- story)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Considering that most people cannot tell the difference between a high bitrate MP3 and source, it would seem to me that this will be wasted on most people (myself included). That said, it is nice to have the option.

</comment><comment><USER2> > Sorry, this trial only works in new versions of the Mozilla Firefox browser.

wow

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=flac](https://caniuse.com/#feat=flac)</comment>


University Issues Passwords by Hand to 38K Students and Staff After Cyber Attack - <AUTHOR> https://secalerts.co/article/university-issues-passwords-by-hand-to-38000-students-and-staff-after-cyber-attack/02eb06d2 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824957), which submitted the original source.

The site guidelines include: " _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._ " [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Although this post did not reveal that it was taken from another source, other publications have credited ZDNet with being the first to report it. [https://www.businessinsider.com/university-giessen-hack- pape...](https://www.businessinsider.com/university-giessen-hack-paper- passwords-germany-38000-students-2019-12)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I found this on our Twitter feed - [https://twitter.com/svblxyz/status/1206948966442708992](https://twitter.com/svblxyz/status/1206948966442708992). The link on the tweet goes to the university website and it's from here that I got all the information for the story. I also found this link on the uni's website that gave me additional information - [https://www.uni- giessen.de/nachrichten.html](https://www.uni-giessen.de/nachrichten.html) (I translated both pages). I hope this helps.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone ever crawled over a billion pages? How much did it cost? - <AUTHOR> I'm really curious to find out how much it'll cost to crawl a billion pages. Doesn't really matter if you used a SaaS solution or built your own crawler, any info would be really useful. <comment><USER2> There's a discussion about a 2 billion page crawl on the frontpage right now. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486631)

Here's the author's comment on hardware [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12487003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12487003) and later he says it costs 300 Euro/month to run the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> That post is what triggered my Ask post.

The problem is the huge contrast with [https://www.quora.com/How-much-would- it-cost-to-crawl-1-bill...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to- crawl-1-billion-sites-using-rented-AWS-servers-bandwidth?share=1)

Even taking into account the drop in prices on AWS. Also, if you take a quick look at companies that provide such services the prices are orders of magnitude higher than deusu's costs.

<comment><USER2> Deusu's crawl servers are located at [https://www.hosteurope.de/en/Server/Root- Server/](https://www.hosteurope.de/en/Server/Root-Server/) while the website points to his home broadband ISP. Two servers at his specs would be 200 Euro/month total, with 5x more bandwidth than he currently uses. I'd say that's much cheaper that AWS. Of course crawl companies charge more: they run a business, pay system administrators, have more backup and redundancy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure how he manages to crawl with this speed using such low amount of resources.

We did a benchmark on Nutch and couldn't really pass the 10-14 M(B)ps on a $1200/month machine. Even though we hired a professional to optimize the setup. The same is roughly true about Heritrix.

Just wondering if there is something missing in his setup, such as domain/ip rate limiting.

<comment><USER3> You can check his source if you are curious how it works ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've crawled over a billion pages over a stretch of 3 years or so. Crawling is the easy task and just crawling a billion pages wouldn't cost more than a few thousand a month. Add a couple more thousand for storing these pages in a search index and database.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you be able to share what your stack was? and the resources it took? Thanks a lot.

<comment><USER4> Ruby and Sidekiq as the messaging queue

Postgres to store the data

Elasticsearch as a search index.

My ES cluster has around 10 nodes, 64 GB RAM, quad-core.

Postgres database cluster is 4 nodes, 1 TB, 64 GB RAM, quad-core.

800 crawler threads distributed across 10 dedicated servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! This sounds reasonable. Did you guys look into professional services for this?

<comment><USER4> Nope. We have lots of custom needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it would be valuable to have an open dataset of a raw crawl index. It could be distributed via academic torrents or partner with a hosting provider.

The real innovation won't be in crawling but in working on the index, filtering it, organizing it, trying sort algorithms and learning.

If this was available and gained popularity I could see competition in search again.</comment>


Assign automation/macros to your numpad with a drag-and-drop editor - <AUTHOR> https://numpadsuperpowers.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, this is a fully fledged app, but I'm giving away the first 125 licenses for free (forever) to get a decent user base - feel free to grab one for yourself :)

I'd also be delighted to hear your thoughts/feedback on this - I hope it helps your productivity like it has for me!</comment>


Stack, Heap, Pool - <AUTHOR> http://bulldozer00.com/2015/09/14/stack-heap-pool/ <comment><USER2> Why is stack allocation so slow? Fundamentally, it should compile down to a single machine expression (mov stack pointer), correct? Sure, the first time it may cause a page exception to allow the OS to grow your stack, but that should only happen once. What else is happening that I'm missing?

AFAICT, the big difference in the linked code is that the stack allocation code uses the constructor whereas the pool allocator uses a special function called reset(). Is this just a bogus benchmark that is measuring the speed difference between the constructor and reset()?

<comment><USER3> It won't even modify the stack pointer during the loop.

Here's what happens: Inbetween every loop iteration, for the correct code (stack & heap), the BigObject has its destructor called, then the constructor is called again, zero filling the array.

For the pool, it calls "reset", which does nothing. What should be done is calling the destructor in place, then the constructor in place. Otherwise you're not really doing the same thing as the other allocations.

Object pools are better than heap allocations, but they are _never_ faster than stack allocation (which is virtually free).

TL;DR: The author is cheating, the benchmark is plain wrong.

<comment><USER4> Note also that the real cost of the pool allocation is up front in the "Pool construction" field. At 368ms in this benchmark, it takes even longer than all of the heap allocations!

With pools, you pay an up-front cost for the faster allocation later. So a better way to arrange the benchmark would be showing off frequent pool creation and deletion of objects.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I'd consider the entire benchmark void.

It really depends on how heap allocation is implemented, so it's hard to compare. By using memory pools, you can allocate a huge block of memory at once from the OS (a small initial cost), and lazily initialize the values. Which brings you: 1. Cache locality. 2. A lot less fragmentation.

I'd rank it as:

1\. Stack allocation (essentially free)

2\. Memory pool (a small hit every once in a while)

3\. Heap allocation (significant overhead compared to the other ones)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By explicitly calling the destructor, you could do away with the requirement that classes must implement a "reset()" member function (which, aside from being an extra step for users, does kind of make RAII in their classes somewhat confusing):

      void release(OBJ* obj) {
        // ...
        obj->OBJ::~OBJ(); // OBJ was the template type
        // ...
      }

acquire() could be improved by using placement new and forwarding the constructor arguments via variadic template:

      template<typename... T>
      OBJ* acquire(T... args) {
        // ...
        return new(mem) OBJ (args...);
      }

Finally, you can exchange potential upfront construction cost (and remove the need for a default constructor in user classes) by making an inner dummy struct that matches the size:

      template<typename OBJ, int32_t NUM_OBJS>
      class Pool {
        struct MockOBJ {
          uint8_t data[sizeof(OBJ)];
        };

        public:
          Pool(){
            // ...
            std::for_each(std::begin(_available), std::end(_available),
              [](OBJ*& mem){mem = reinterpret_cast<OBJ*>(new MockOBJ);});
            // ...
          }
      // ...
      };

</comment><comment><USER5> Did similar profiling with Borland/Turbo C++ a while back. (yes, I am that young. )

When I needed to alloc() 1-100 millions objects, the alloc, delete() api times did increase exponentially. BC++ profiler tracked that down to free list traversal.

Implemented my own version of pool with C++, and the new/delete time dropped down to constant times. Later one, I implemented a version on Linux (both in Kernel and User space + SMP) on faster CPU (1.5GHz) and get that API time down to sub micro-seconds measured with rdtsc.

It makes a huge difference for any code that need to alloc/delete millions+ objects as fast as possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is the author testing with optimizations off? If the worry is that the optimizer will delete the code you're trying to time (a valid worry, since it actually does for me) then you should come up with better test code that the optimizer won't remove, not just turn it off. The performance of unoptimized code can be vastly different in all sorts of ways, and it's not usually very informative.

</comment><comment><USER7> This code is not only non-optimal, but also inneficient.

First, it does a linear search - O(n) time - because it keeps adding null pointers for elements that are removed from each list. This makes literally no sense. Just removing the null pointer insertion would already improve the performance a lot.

Second, the multiset is also a poor choice for the available objects list, given its performance characteristics. A structure like a deque, with O(1) insertion/removal on both ends, would be much more suited for the job.

There are a few papers/presentations on memory allocation for C++ from Andrei Alexandrescu, like this one: [http://nwcpp.org/talks/2008/memory- allocation.screen.pdf](http://nwcpp.org/talks/2008/memory- allocation.screen.pdf)

I'd suggest giving them a read, they give some good insights about simple yet very powerful techniques for improving memory allocation with little code.

</comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR: the author compares object allocation times of heap, stack, and pool methods, in C++. Heap is slowest, stack is much faster, pool is insanely fast. A pool implementation is shown.

<comment><USER9> Am I the only one who believes "TL;DR" adds negative value here (in general, not just your contribution) ?

<comment><USER10> You are almost certainly not the only one, but I can't say I agree with you. In an age where we're bombarded by information and it is a struggle (if even possible) to stay current on technology trends, TL;DR's give a summary allowing you to make a more informed decision on whether an article is worth your time - titles just aren't usually sufficient to determine that.

<comment><USER11> If you just blindly read the TL;DR's, though, you're ceding judgement of the merits of the article to whoever wrote the TL;DR.

In this case, the TL;DR parrots the (false) conclusion from the article, so if you stopped here, you now have false facts in your brain.

<comment><USER10> As I have said, this is a problem with specific TL;DRs not the general concept of them. (It is still a relevant concern, but it isn't sufficient reason to disregard them completely.)

Also, I generally use TL;DRs to decide _WHAT_ to read, I don't use them as my source of information. So I would have disregarded the TL;DRs incorrect conclusion and read the article for myself (which I did).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend Project for Mothers Day - WeCallYourMom.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.wecallyourmom.com

<comment><USER2> I don't understand. You want me to outsource calling my mom on mother's day? Is this for actively deployed troops or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I don't know if that's a good use case or not. If you can reach your mom by phone, then you should probably make the call yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this set up over twilio?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it is.</comment></comment>


Google May Be Stealing Mobile Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/ <comment><USER2> "I hope I am not being too hard on Google." \-- no, the author is being very, very nice. Google has a strong business interest in users never going to other sites. Between AMP & voice search, the future is going to be very rough for businesses that rely on free search traffic.

In practical business terms I would strongly suggest website owners build ultra-light versions of their sites. If you have international aspirations your site should work on Opera Mini. If you have a big audience it is very reasonable and worth it to have desktop/tablet, smartphone, and ultra-lite versions of your site.

Reposting part of a comment I made a month back on AMP:

#1 There is a big problem with mobile sites. I'm using a recent iPhone and many popular news sites, without ad blockers, are as close to unusable as the worst websites I've ever been to, dating back to using Internet Explorer in 1999. Auto playing inline video ads that slide in to view, just insane. These things clearly kill time on site and reader retention. I have theories about why publishers are ignoring this, but who knows.

#2 Google is using AMP to co-opt publisher's traffic. This means users are scrolling to another story from another publisher or easily bouncing back to the Google results when they land on your content. (See the X in the story link on the animated gif example.) There goes your time on site and long term user retention. If #1 was a problem for you already, you probably don't notice.

#3 AMP & Instant articles are going to put a stranglehold on third party ad networks and represent a very real anti-trust issue. There are a bunch of other privacy implications too, which have been discussed in length. Publishers should be thinking really hard about their future.

<comment><USER3> How do you suggest publishers who are dependent on traffic from Google cope with AMP in the short-term? It seems like there is no way to compete with AMP- enabled content on Google ranking except by adopting AMP.

<comment><USER4> Stop using amp and find other ways to optimize and minifity their websites for mobile? Foundation has the ability to include only the components you want if you build it using SASS and by including/minifiying the individual Javascript files during your build process.

The more I look at AMP the more I absolutely hate it. This is just another thing to make me not want to use it.

If Google points to a site, they should serve your site. If they're serving from cache, put in a DMCA and tell them hands off your content.

<comment><USER5> It would be sooo bad if your business suffered a search rank penalty due to the lack of AMP. It would be a real shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AMP is essentially Google's answer to people creating terrible web experiences. It's been discussed and documented a lot. Common webpages today load content from dozens of different ad, tracking and whatever hosts, take several megabytes to load. All well known, but people don't stop doing it.

Now Google comes along and says: You can't do it, let us do it. Which is perfectly reasonable from their point of view. And when I surf google news on my slow mobile connection I'm always happy when I see that a link is going to an amp target - because then I know it'll be loaded fast.

But you don't need Google to do that. If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing. Limit the amount of stuff you load into your page, reduce the third party content that you include to a sane number of hosts (something like 3 instead of 50), optimize your javascript, deploy HTTP/2\. None of that is magic and you can have your fast webpage without any AMP.

<comment><USER7> > If you don't like AMP nobody stops you from doing the same thing.

The AMP symbol tells users that the site loads quickly. Google doesn't indicate the same thing about non-AMP sites that still load quickly. Guess which site the user will tend to choose. I am not sure AMP will be optional for sites that want to get chosen.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure non tech users don't even know what AMP is for.

<comment><USER9> They don't have to though. If there's a symbol and sites with that symbol are faster, they'll learn to look for the symbol, perhaps not even consciously.

<comment><USER10> >They don't have to though. If there's a symbol and sites with that symbol are faster, they'll learn to look for the symbol, perhaps not even consciously.

Totally disagree. I didn't know what AMP is and I keep seeing it. I avoided it thinking it was yet-another Google adware property like DoubleClick, another cleverly named way to trick users.

For the vast majority of users on 4G connections, AMP loads aren't that much faster (When you download 8MB/sec on 4G, a 2MB page is just not a deal breaker) and I doubt that very many users at all in America are noticing that dramatic of difference on their devices, enough to subconsciously learn to like it.

<comment><USER11> Bandwidth is often not the limiting factor on mobile networks. AMP reduces the number of TCP connections your browser has to open (each of which requires 2 RTTs, and many of which will have HTTPS running over them which requires another one or two RTTs).

Take all those connections and introduce a 1-5% packet loss rate, and suddenly there's a very good chance that any given "page load" (really dozens of requests) takes perceptually "forever". That is what AMP helps with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The whole idea of AMP seems like it's really the wrong way to solve the problem. If you remove all the third party JavaScript, fonts, large images and "like" buttons you'll have effectively the same. I guess it already messes up ads and analytics (although I'd assume Google's services still work), so what's the problem?

Kind of related: I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I found a minimal theme, but the amount of junk it was loading was shocking. I created a stripped down version if anyone is interested: [https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus- theme](https://github.com/lucaspiller/hugo-privacy-cactus-theme)

<comment><USER13> In the last 5 years there was NO WORDPRESS THEME OR PLUGIN that I didn't have to modify. I never saw any WP theme that comes with minified CSS/JS, handles sidebars correctly - sidebar created after post content, generated by PHP not JS, generates correct <a> tags, even one "modern" theme had links in sidebar with "nofollow"... "SEO-friendly" plugins that make blog generation time 3-5 times longer than before, of course JS not minified, jQuery and fonts linked with ?version=xxxx (prevents server and browser from caching it), social buttons that were downloading ~1MB of scripts and CSS (for Facebook, Twitter, G+ and Pinterest).

Whole WP ecosystem is a huge pile of crap, each plugin adds more and more mess to it. I tried Hugo and Joomla, but they were even worse (Joomla had a few security issues that developers refuse to fix, Hugo was more bloated than WP).

After trying and modifying over 20 acceptable themes I decided to start working on my own blogging platform that will be SEO-friendly and clean.

<comment><USER14> Agreed on the WP part. At the same time, when you make a WP theme from scratch, with Twig and without all the crap, your WP becomes surprisingly fast.

Hugo is a completely different thing, don't compare it to WP.

<comment><USER15> Why not compare Hugo to WP? That is what people do who want to create a new website.

They take a different angle, but the goal for both is to allow for easy maintainable websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't (and never will) use AMP and I feel that it is patently unfair to penalize pages for not using some non-standard tech. Google should index the web fairly, not make use of their tech a factor. Webpage speed is a fair measure (and I really wouldn't know what I could do to make my pages any faster, AMP will not make a measurable difference).

I would expect an un-biased search engine to rate pages with and without AMP equal and to not show 'badges' based on whether or not a page uses tech by the same vendor of the search engine.

<comment><USER17> In my opinion, the problem is that your version of unbiased doesn't add much value to a user (and is actually biased for the website-owners). For example, SourceForge started adding a lot of misleading 'Download' buttons all over their page, and they might ask the same thing about 'an unbiased ranking' (Google's always been criticized for being the 'Web Police'). As a user however, I'd want Sourceforge's rankings go down the drain because it uses (directly or through its advertisers, doesn't matter) such a bad practice of getting users to click on the ads. AMP is similar. They're giving better ranking to pages which add value to the user, and are probably less concerned about the webmaster. In countries with slow internet, AMP adds a lot of value. You click, and the page is there (no waiting icons and 'downloading' for a few seconds)

(Edit: Sure, Sourceforge was improved a lot after the new owners, it was just used as an example)

<comment><USER16> The best solution to combat bloat is less bloat, not faster ways to deliver bloat (all that will do is increase the budget for bloat).

<comment><USER17> Why not both?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not your site any more. You're just a free content provider to Google now.

<comment><USER19> When I heard about AMP, I didn't get warm fuzzies. I didn't exactly know how or why, but something told me that the main benefactor with this technology was Google, not the user, and certainly not the content provider.

I can make pages faster without AMP by stripping the needless bloat and using a proper CDN. Why do I need this tech again, besides the artificial goad of page rank?

<comment><USER20> If you're willing to put in all the work to do it yourself, and also pay for CDN (though it probably won't be as good as Google's), then feel free to do it.

But yeah, nothing's free. They give you this great technology, free access to their world-wide CDN, and better organic search results, at the cost of having the X button going back to search.

Though I have no idea how the author things that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly... You open an article, you close the article. If you want to go to the homepage, you click the top banner with the logo.

<comment><USER21> >I have no idea how the author thinks that the "X" button should go back to the home page honestly

He's not suggesting the "X" leads to the _home_ [0] page, but to the actual "deeplink" page (blogpost, etc).

I'm not the author, but here's my idea:

Normal webpage: click result in Google, page loads (for a long time), I click reader view, read some, close reader view, explore the site.

AMP page: allows me to skip the loading time & the click on 'reader view' and start reading directly (so far, so good), but then I close "(AMP) reader view" and want to explore the site. Instead I am back at square one, exactly where Google wants me to be.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/869/](https://xkcd.com/869/)

<comment><USER22> You hit the nail on the head. The cost to the publisher is added discoverablility of their other content and the ad revenue that comes from it (it also hits networks like Taboola hard).

Their success becomes ever more tied to Google for the next hit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wired broke this story [1] in February 2016, soon after Google announced it'd start directing results to the AMP Cache on the mobile site. In the meta- writeup the next day, Wired wrote "Google's AMP Is Speeding Up the Web By Changing How It Works" [2], while noting that this was a necessary step to compete with Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple's equivalent tech.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages- us...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-use-fast- loading-tech/)

[2] [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web- chang...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing- works/)

</comment><comment><USER24>
        > I was expecting it to cause a redirect to the original
        > article. Instead it redirects back to Google search
        > results. Say What?

Well, what it does is exactly what I would expect; if clicking 'X' redirected to the author's site _I_ would be thoroughly confused.

If I click on a link and it opens in a new tab, I don't close the tab ('X') expecting to go to the home page - I expect to go back to the page from which I opened it.

<comment><USER25> I agree with your expectation of clicking the 'X' going back to the results.

But it's a bit strange, why have the 'X' there at all when the browser back button will do exactly the same thing more naturally?

<comment><USER24> I imagine it's to enhance the feeling that the user just quickly popped something open over their search results - designing it to make it 'feel' like a different; faster experience.

<comment><USER26> Google wants you back in their serps as fast as possible and for you to notice that it's an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _Google was injecting a large toolbar at the top of the snapshot encouraging > users to get back to Google search results (a functionality already provided > by the back button)_

I learned, through a series of usability tests my (former) startup ran amongst its users, that most non-tech people do not click the back button and get very confused if your pages don't have their own back/forward/close/menu navigation.

We moved our apps workflow from "use the browsers back button to go back" to having all navigation including back/close as part of the HTML UI.

<comment><USER28> i question the validity of your test and/or it's application in the current context.

what I am hearing is "the average non-technical person incapable of using Google."

<comment><USER27> These people weren't incapable of using Google or computers. Some users were business-types who are used to using a lot of web-based SaaS tools and quite capable and comfortable using computers.

By non-technical I really meant they weren't developers; they were sales, marketing and management type people.

When asked, it simply didn't occur to most of them to simply press the back button.

Now, its not apples to apples, of course, and since this was in a web app where there may well have been a fear that pressing back would lose the page like you do in some (badly designed) single page applications, its possible that this skewed the results somewhat. Either way, we found that adding in- page navigation improved the workflow for almost everyone.

<comment><USER28> but how they use your application is not a reflection of how they use the web at large.

i'm not surprised by your study's result, I'm just not sure you can extend your conclusion to believe that people won't or can't click the back button to return to Google after clicking a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why would I want to give up 10% of my screen space to a useless bar that when I try to exit out instead takes me away from the page? Complete UX madness.

<comment><USER30> I've asked @amphtml why they're adding it: [https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824](https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/787968936251981824)

<comment><USER31> The URL bar shows "google.com" in a lot of mobile browsers (including the one in your screenshot), the bar shows the original website this content is from

<comment><USER32> Trying to fix an issue that the AMP system itself introduced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think that this whole AMP thing is horrible for the web.

It's like Google is not dictating how one should build/style their websites. Thanks, but no thanks. Stay evil, Google.

<comment><USER34> Google has an eye on the next billion web users---the ones who aren't on the network yet because of cost and bandwidth. Their experience will be significantly bandwidth-constrained in the short run, and AMP is one of the initiatives to provide a segment of the web that works in such an ecosystem.

If the web were going in a direction to serve that demographic organically, AMP wouldn't be necessary.

<comment><USER35> But it's actively making the Internet _worse_ for the current users. Is it worth destroying the current user base in order to attract a new one?

<comment><USER34> How is it making the Internet worse for current users?

<comment><USER33> Well do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid standards like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp __and __non- amp so you 'd be doing both?

I see it as complete bollocks.

<comment><USER34> > Do you really like the idea that when you go to some search result it > effectively is opening an iframe to the website you're trying to go?

As an end-user or web developer?

As an end-user, I do not care. In fact, it seems that the AMP solution (which isn't an iframe so much as just serving the data from Google's cache at a Google URL) is faster.

> Or as a web developer you need to make sure to adopt to their stupid > standards like renaming your img to amp-img and making sure it works in amp > and non-amp so you'd be doing both?

As a developer, if I care enough about my user's experience to be bothering with AMP in the first place, I should be using a toolchain that makes it pretty straightforward to go from my meta-representation of my content to the render target (HTML / css, etc.). Because that toolchain should already be doing things like precompiling my CSS, condensing my image data, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Actually having the site served from the same, already-open, probably pre- fetched connection, already open browser is great for the user.

It even has the advantage of loading inside the Google App, where no adblocking exists, so it might even be good for publishers.

Yes, there's no discovery if you don't design for that, user will just bounce.

<comment><USER37> > having the site served from the same, already-open, probably pre-fetched > connection

So, the bottleneck is really the connection setup time? Seems to me, that http2 largely solves that problem, while html already supports prefetch.

Don't kid yourself, the goal here is a better web _locked into the google ecosystem_.

<comment><USER36> http2+quic+proper support in the browser can probably help you here. The thing is all of this is available today inside the google{, news} app.

It might be locking you in the Google ecosystem, but the project is open source, and if there wasn't a monopoly in search/ads it wouldn't be an issue…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Consider adding a link at the top of your AMP page, giving user an option to > visit the original post

Why should they want to read the post again? The only viable option is to have links to other posts on your site, or maybe a link to the comments.

By the way, what's the purpose of the bar at the top? The back button of the browser already does that, even on mobile.

About analytics: I don't know if those accesses don't show on Google Analytics (I really don't) but what if one uses Piwik? Is there any way to get a report of the access?

<comment><USER39> "By the way, what's the purpose of the bar at the top? The back button of the browser already does that, even on mobile."

It has a slide-out animation to it?

<comment><USER38> I assume it's an effect that plays when one taps the back arrow in the bar. I'm using Opera on my phone, no animation there, so I can only guess.

The are page transitions. Considering that Google controls both the source and destination page I'm sure they can make one without stealing space on screen. That annoys the user more than the owner of the content.

And if the user has a browser that doesn't support page transitions, it's only a waste of screen space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This feels much more like FB's "instant articles" than what I actually want (as a user) from my web pages.

</comment><comment><USER41> I still can't get over the fact that AMP breaks the img tag and requires JavaScript.

My long-running browsers instances are bogged down by JavaScript (and I have NoScript on whitelist mode, with it only allowed where necessary!). Requiring it on any fast-page standard seems counterproductive.

And why, _why_ would they break the img tag‽

<comment><USER42> AMP doesn't "break" the img tag. It's more optimal to use the amp-img tag for AMP pages, but if you use img instead it's not going to break your page.

>And why, why would they break the img tag‽

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/amp_replacements](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/amp_replacements)

<comment><USER37> As far as I can tell the amp-img tag doesn't add anything that img doesn't already support. The page simply mentions some vague statement about needing to understand the page layout, but uses the same attributes as img.

<comment><USER42> Did you click the support first-viewport preloading link?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> AMP in general is rather gimmick and scam. Just normal regular HTML stripped from third party tracking JS--dozen of megabytes--provides pages of the same size. It's only a matter of clean code to make a page mobile friendly.

Introducing yet another additional markup format to serve mobile sites with the only purpose for Google to compete better with Facebook is excessive and additional dev overhead. But it favours Google's interests and Google basically blackmails content providers locking search availability to only those who obey. And additionally it gives Google excuse to serve pages via own domain with backlinking.

There should be just common practices for mobile code simplicity and not another new markup.

<comment><USER44> I wish they would kill it, personally. It makes sites feel and act weird different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I get that this is frustrating, but this is exactly what Google said it would do. You can still track your traffic through analytics (per my GA setup, it shows the regular domain's AMP page, rather than Google's site), and you can still run ads against it if that's what you would like to do.

It's not so much a shock as it is a "new normal." Whether you like that new normal, that's up to you.

(For what it's worth, AMP causes a significant bump to my bounce rate, made up by the higher number of visits that come in via users looking for the AMP symbol.)

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, considering that said traffic originated from Google, and that Google was under no obligation to send it to OP's page, it's a little more nuanced than "stealing". It just means they sent different behaving traffic than usual - traffic that only touches one article and returns to Google.

It might discourage webmasters from adopting AMP though, if they have the expectation to lead the visitor to the homepage or other articles.

<comment><USER47> I really love the speed of AMP pages, but I don't like the fact that the server request is proxied through Google.

This is akin to an ISP injecting their own little optimization toolbar into pages rendered to the user, except that cert pinning isn't even an option here, since Google is doing the content re-writing at the app tier. They even manage to keep the browser security icon green, creating the at-a-glance perception that the data provenance can be trusted!

If Google edge caching really is critical, then I'd rather see an architecture in which the AMP content is signed by the originating site, and the signature is looked up and validated client-side. This might incur a bit more of a performance hit for sites that are being overwhelmed, but really, that's as it should be -- as an end user, it's surprising that my AMP results are essentially a Google cache. And it would seem that Google goes to good lengths to make the look-and-feel appear browser-like, instead of calling out the cached nature of the response.

<comment><USER48> > And it would seem that Google goes to good lengths to make the look-and-feel > appear browser-like, instead of calling out the cached nature of the > response.

Why would a cached website be shown looking different from a non-cached one?

<comment><USER47> The fact that it's being served out of Google's servers changes the trust model for the content. End users have no good reason to trust Google with the cached data, but people assign trust to them when they click an AMP link. There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of Google's caches rather than from the content provider. I find that misleading.

Typically, cached web pages come out of edge caches, either maintained by a CDN selected by the content provider, an end-user's ISP, or by a box on the local network. In this case, _Google_ \-- the search engine -- is fundamentally changing the nature of how the user obtains the third-party search result content.

IMO this is very different than my company or ISP doing some edge caching. It's different because it is much more of an opt-in sort of relationship, and, more importantly, because it's decentralized -- if Comcast starts to muck with search result content, Verizon users will notice the discrepancy. If Google takes advantage of their monopoly position and alters AMP content, nobody except the content providers will be the wiser.

<comment><USER34> > End users have no good reason to trust Google with the cached data

I'd imagine that end users who don't trust Google aren't using Google.

> There's no real indication to an end user that that data is coming out of > Google's caches rather than from the content provider.

Users who care can see the URL and the domain for which the cert is signed. Most users do not care.

> IMO this is very different than my company or ISP doing some edge caching. > It's different because it is much more of an opt-in sort of relationship...

I don't see why I can't substitute "Google" and "Bing" for "Comcast" and "Verizon" in your example.

For that matter, at least in the U.S., it's a lot easier to switch out my search engine than my ISP if Comcast starts to muck with result content. FWIW, Verizon already redirects failures of domain name resolution to itself. I don't like it, and there's not much I can do about it if I want Internet around here.

> If Google takes advantage of their monopoly position and alters AMP content, > nobody except the content providers will be the wiser.

That's a fair concern, but the day Google does that is the day a media firestorm blows AMP out of the water as a trustworthy tool.

<comment><USER48> > That's a fair concern, but the day Google does that is the day a media > firestorm blows AMP out of the water as a trustworthy tool.

And in particular, it looks (at a quick check) like the google hosted files are in a very predictable location, so it should be easy to write something to check both that version and the hosted version against each other to monitor for discrepancies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> AMP is a terrible format and makes 0 progress for the open web.

HTML is already fast, it's all the extra resources added that makes pages slow. For publishers, the reason sites are slow is a combination of ad revenue pressure, poor tech skills, lack of time and focus on other priorities like producing content in a saturated market. This is changing slowly so that UX is more important but creating an entirely new proprietary system that only takes time away from the main site (and just affects mobile) is not the right answer.

More interestingly, the #1 most used adserver on the planet is Google's own DoubleClick - which means they could singlehandedly make all sites (desktop + mobile) faster by implementing better tech in their own stack.

</comment><comment> yoz-y Hm. The x button he mentions is only visible if you got to the page from Google search. If you follow the direct link to the amp page then the header just mentions his original URL as the browser (mobile safari). I would say that such behaviour is quite consistent with mobile so... whatever.

<comment><USER50> can you imagine if every site that linked to yours had a bar at the top of your page that said "back to facebook" or "back to wikipedia"? mobile web users know how to use the back button but google is taking up your screen real-estate to drive traffic back to google.

this reminds me of sites in the early web that used to link out to sites and frame them with a banner at the top. websites countered this with frame- breaker scripts -- but publishers really shouldn't have to do that.

<comment><USER51> > can you imagine if every site that linked to yours had a bar at the top of > your page that said "back to facebook" or "back to wikipedia"?

I saw a site do this yesterday. It was so noticeable because I only permit same-origin JavaScript and the whole site broke (most actually work).

Then I realised there is an intermediary providing this service:

[http://linkis.com/](http://linkis.com/)

It is the worst of all things.

<comment><USER52> you can detect if your page is running inside iframe and if so, make the browser to load only your page, to get rid of services such as linkis.com

<comment><USER53> but does this work with AMP pages that restrict the javascript?

<comment><USER51> AMP is "HTML with some restrictions".

Speaks nothing of HTTP (otherwise they could've done the right thing and added a "text/html;amp=1" content-type).

In theory this should still work: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Frame-Options)

But I doubt that Google's AMP cache will respect existing headers (the very nature of the cache stuff means that they won't, but what they will do to non- cache headers on an item is undefined AFAIK and so they will probably just strip them).

<comment><USER54> a quick look at an amp page (from google's cache) shows it's being served with x-frame-options:SAMEORIGIN, so looks like the linkis thing won't work with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The fact that you can not go to the original page from the AMP page bothers me so much. I go as far as avoid AMP pages altogether just because of that reason.

</comment><comment><USER56> Aren't you supposed to put links to your other articles at the bottom of that AMP page? I mean, that seems like the best way to get users to visit your full site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A tech lead from Google wrote his response, if anybody is interested:

[https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your- mobile-...](https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile- traffic/#comment-55336)

</comment><comment><USER57> I assume Google ads that are served through AMP will still count. In that case, you can think of AMP as a high-speed static host where you still get paid even though you didn't pay for hosting. But I agree it's very surprising behavior to the actual owner of the website.

The usability downside of providing a link to the actual webpage should be obvious - Google is trying to pretend this _is_ the actual webpage. Why would they want a redundant link just to confuse the users?

That said, ever since Android separated google results view from chrome and added that strange "x->back" button thing I keep getting tripped up from a usability perspective. That's more the Android team being silly again, not just AMP, I think.

</comment><comment><USER58> > Explore the site further OR hit the back button to go back to Google search > results

I set Google to open links in a new tab anyway so the X the OP is complaining about is actually exactly my browsing style to click X and go back to search results.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why doesn't the author just measure how much money they are making? They seem to think some things are bad (header bar, etc) but as far as I can tell they could find out very easily if using AMP is helping or hurting.

</comment><comment><USER60> I work for several large newspaper publishers. We have been getting pushed to get all of our content optimized for the AMP experience as to not get left behind. As stated by others though this is good for the end consumer, not so much for the newspaper industry itself.

One of the biggest gripes is getting our paywall model onto the AMP sites, as we have very little input as to how that is done. It also takes ages to hear back about requests/suggestions with little feedback as to why they think its a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER61> The web is not your personal money generator. It's a place I go for information. I'm sorry that your fellow developers have made it such a user- hostile place that projects like AMP that defend the user experience make it harder for you to make money. But maybe if you're only interested in publishing for the money, I'm not particularly interested in courting your continued participation.

</comment><comment><USER62> Posting my comment from the article here:

Hey, this is Malte and I am the tech lead of the AMP Project for Google. While I work on the AMP open source project, I did check back with the Google Search team that is more directly responsible for most of the points mentioned in the post. I personally find it very important to respond, because "stealing traffic" is literally the opposite of what AMP is for. The original idea behind AMP was to allow content to be distributed to platforms (such as Google, Twitter and Pinterest) in a way that retains branding and monetization control for the publisher. AMP traffic is the publisher's traffic. Period.

I also realize that "just turning on the WordPress plugin" doesn't get you there. Especially if a WordPress installation is heavily customized, one will need to invest similar effort to get the AMP pages to the same quality. While this may be a lot of work, this is by design: We recommend to really optimize AMP pages and fine tune them to your needs. AMP is not a templated format for that reason. While neither the AMP project, nor Google are directly responsible for the WordPress plugin, the AMP open source project working closely with the authors of the plugin(s) to improve the quality and scope. AMP is very flexible and should be capable of providing most features of a typical WordPress site, but this flexibility also requires respective work to make custom plugins and development show up in the AMP version.

Getting more literal about "stealing traffic": there are audience measurement platforms that attribute traffic to publishers. They might in theory wrongly attribute AMP traffic to the AMP Cache (not Google) rather than to a publisher because they primarily use referrer information. That is why we worked with them in worldwide outreach to get this corrected (where it was a problem), so that traffic is correctly attributed to the publisher. If this is still a problem anywhere, AMP treats it as a highest priority to get it resolved.

"Ask Google to give users an easy option to view the original post."

Let us start by saying that we love URLs as much as everyone else, and we tried hard to make the AMP URL scheme as usable as possible given the technical constraints of web apps. We're looking at ways to make the source link more discoverable and will update once that is done. AMP is super flexible in terms of how a publisher can direct traffic to their site. Typical ways to get to a publisher's homepage (like clicking the logo) should just work and are in no way restricted. Also, make sure to check out amp-sidebar ([https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp- sidebar/](https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-sidebar/)) for adding a menu to your AMP pages.

If you are not comfortable with traffic on your AMP pages, please do not publish AMP pages. Google Search has 2 types of AMP related features:

Normal search: AMP does not influence ranking. Your pages will appear in the same spot with or without AMP. AMP specific features (such as the "Top Stories Carousel"): For these features, we believe that AMP is the format that currently delivers the best possible user experience on the mobile web. That is because AMP allows for consistent speed, caching, pre-rendering, and enables swiping between full-length pages. This is a big deal for topics where there isn't "that one best result" that a user might want to look at.

"Google takes away ad revenue on AMP pages"

AMP supports over 60 ad networks (2 of them are owned by Google) with 2-3 coming on board every week and makes absolutely no change to business terms whatsoever. There is no special revenue share for AMP.

"If Google cares so much about the mobile experience, why cover 15% of the small mobile screen with a fat bar at the top?"

The Android users might have already noticed that it is now scrolling out of the way and the same is coming soon for iOS (we're just fighting a few jank issues in Safari). Similarly we're spearheading a long term effort ([https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller](https://github.com/bokand/NonDocumentRootScroller)) to allow web apps to define how the address bar is hidden on scrolling. It looks like this will land in Chrome soon, providing even more space to web pages.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's been known all along that Google AMP serves pages from its CDN and that Google adds a bar at the top. The author would have know as well if they had paid attention from the get go instead of bragging about their 5 minute "install". Nothing to see here, move along.

<comment><USER64> Yes there is something to see here: Google doesn't provide a way to reach the original site from the version they serve from their CDN.

<comment><USER63> You can click on any of the links in the article. It will get out of the Google AMP session, and open them in a browser. You can have your own site header and whatever series of links pointing inside your site, like you would on your regular non-amp landing page. This author is whining about a non- problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The new Google News interface has done this for a while and I absolutely hate it.

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't know if it's because I'm using an iOS ad blocker or the sites are misconfigured, but many AMO sites simply fail to load on my iPhone. AMP has been an awful experience for me, as an end user.

</comment><comment><USER67> "Cache-Control: private"

Google has to be respecting Cache-Control headers, right? Set your AMP pages to return that. Then they won't be allowed to cache them.

</comment><comment><USER68> I've been wondering if AMP isn't an play to actively decreased app installs. You can't include a Smart App Banner in an AMP page.

</comment><comment><USER69> My biggest problem with AMP is I can never go directly to the source. AMP has buggy scrolling and can be quite annoying sometimes.

<comment><USER70> long press on link and click open in new tab on search

<comment><USER69> thanks. but it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I think the next step for Google is to provide a free hosting service, where ad income is shared by Google and the content provider.

<comment><USER72> I agree, since that's pretty much what AMP is doing (free cdn/hosting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Seeing analytics built into AMP makes me laugh. Does that not go against producing the most enjoyable user experience possible?

<comment><USER26> No because you can have both at the same time? When was the last time you noticed there was analytics happening on the page you were on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Would a robots file block google from caching your site? I guess that would block google entirely though..

<comment><USER14> Not the AMP version. The AMP version is there for Google only, so if you want to prevent them from caching, simply don't serve an AMP version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I ran into this but didn't know what was going on. Seems kind of sleazy.

</comment><comment><USER76> "may be"?

</comment><comment><USER77> Ridiculous.

Try using www.yandex.com as your search engine, it is surprisingly good, and has less ads disguised as "search results" and results from blog-spam sites and such nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER78> I can't wait 'till the author finds out that sometimes the browsers cache resources... These terrible browsers stealing his page impressions.

<comment><USER79> Are you implying this is the same thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> So you installed a WP plugin without doing any research and hoped it would make your pages faster by using unicorns and magic, or to quote

> Most importantly, I was surprised to find out that instead of redirecting > users to an optimized version hosted on my server, Google was actually > serving a snapshot of the page from their own cache.

and now you're upset that they really only made it faster via caching it, not actual magic.

Were you perchance born yesterday or are you just very naive...?

<comment><USER79> Your comment is very similar to victim blaming.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Practice foreign languages with books (parallel translation and speech) - <AUTHOR> http://paralleltext.io/ <comment><USER2> I like this idea a lot, but it's somewhat difficult to use when you have to flip back and forth in a sentence to connect parts of it together especially since a lot of languages cannot be translated word for word. It would be nice to see both the sentence and translation at the same time, maybe in a sidebar or a tooltip that hovers above the sentence with the translation. But this is something that I really enjoy using in conjunction with something like duo lingo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've gotten mixed requests for both split view and current view. I'm working on adding a split view option. Please let me know if you have any other feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One suggestion I have is to be able to select multiple sentences and flip them, or break the text into sections and show the target language text on the opposing "page."

The reason I suggest this is because many non-Romance and non-Germanic languages are not and cannot be translated 1:1 to English, so the sentence and paragraph structures will be different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, you see the translated version.

That's why I didn't want to put a direct translation, the versions supplied are the original translations, so you can understand the meaning of the sentence from context.

<comment><USER3> > Sorry, how is this different from now? If you click next to the paragraph, > you see the translated version.

Right now, they're per-sentence, as far as I can tell (though I haven't looked very much); I haven't seen any multi-sentence passages (paragraphs) that I can convert all at once.

As an example, I was thinking of something like:

Translation: "Sentence A. Sentence B. Sentence C."

Original: "Sentence B, part of A. Sentence A remainder. Sentence C."

In that case, clicking the convert arrow for Sentence B in the translation won't give you anything useful for Sentence B.</comment></comment></comment>


Researchers create a kilobyte of rewritable atom-sized memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2016.131.html <comment><USER2> Several submissions of this item:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615) (gizmodo.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116577) (sciencenewsline.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127) (wsj.com)

Which will win the race for votes?

</comment><comment><USER3> open arXiv version from April: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265)

Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole world.

A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to 1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND flash). But it requires ultrahigh vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid nitrogen temperature.

Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would write 500MB in 240 years.

I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.</comment>